The disclosure relates to the testing of integrated circuits, and more specifically relates to numerical test data reporting using an image file and subsequent analysis of the test data.
Integrated circuit testers typically log functional test data in two different ways. One method is by performing a logging of every measurement to an American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) file. The large amount of functional test data collected using this approach typically requires periodically pausing test execution and queries of the tester hardware during generation of the ASCII file. This results in a very large ASCII file which can take an excessive amount of time to generate and an excessive amount of time to analyze during post-processing.
One approach to address this situation is to limit the number of failures identified to a predefined maximum. Unfortunately, this approach mandates not capturing all of the functional test data. In addition, this approach may add complexity in those cases where the number of failures reaches the predefined maximum. Another approach includes performing a binary dump of the functional data to an image file. Although this can be completed in a much shorter time, the functional data in the image file is not provided in a way that is conducive to statistical analysis during post-processing.